There's not been a day, one hasn't gone by, when I don't think about the day he didn't die

Thankfully, while the current administration seems intent on making sure that all our news is bad news (how exactly did nuclear allegations about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea all turn out wrong anyway?...), they are as incompetent with regard to this task as they are to all the efforts they undertake. Today actually brought us two lightly related bits of good news, to offset the cratering of the stock market, the politically motivated firings of several US Attorneys, the first signs of the military taking some responsibility for the Walter Reed debacle about four years too late, etc.

It appears that there is some very encouraging news in the fight against malaria, one of the world's true preventable health crises.

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

A treatment will cost less than $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for children. Adults with malaria will take only two pills a day for three days, and the pill will come in three smaller once-a-day sizes for infants, toddlers and youngsters.
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Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

As to the medical charity, they should be pretty familiar to you, since they are the February/March Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Médecins sans Frontières, a.k.a. Doctors without Borders. They even got the company to agree not to patent the drug, so generic versions will be legal worldwide. Let me suggest that this is an even better time to support their efforts. Your $25 may save up to 50 children's lives, by my count. Seriously, how can you not give at that rate of return on your money?

Further good news on the malaria front comes by way of a study performed in Uganda:

San Francisco and African AIDS researchers reported Tuesday that they had virtually eliminated malaria in a group of highly vulnerable, HIV-infected children simply by providing them with a daily dose of antibiotic and having them sleep under an insecticide-treated mosquito net.

The study conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in collaboration with researchers from San Francisco General Hospital found the bed net and antibiotic combination reduced the risk of malaria an astonishing 97 percent among the HIV-infected kids compared with a similar group of healthy children who did not receive the antibiotic and most of whom did not sleep under a bed net.
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The antibiotic used in the study is cotrimoxazole -- sold in the United States under brand names such as Bactrim and Septra. The oral antibiotic is produced by generic drugmakers, and can be provided to children for pennies a day. But cost is always an issue in Africa and even the $5 cost of an insecticide-treated bed net is prohibitive for poor families.

Let's do a quick calculation, shall we? The Iraq war currently costs about $200 billion per year, once all costs are factored in. Figuring on two nets per person ($10), we could basically keep about 20 billion people from getting malaria in Africa each year...except for the fact that there are only about 6 billion people on the planet at the moment. Quite literally, in choosing to eliminate malaria or fight a war, we chose the war, and it's not even working out so well...when people try to make moral cases for war, make sure to remind them of these numbers, and then point out the millions displaced and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.

A quick update to a point I made about a month ago. Apparently, pressure is growing in Europe to require publicly funded scientific research to be made freely available to the public. According to the BBC:

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication.
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Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world.
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For years, the research model has remained relatively static.

In many countries, government funding agencies in the sciences, social sciences, and health sciences dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support research at national universities.

This statement is correct in many fields, but the BBC forgot to note that the revolution has already occurred in several, starting with high energy physics, and now encompassing a significant chunk of the physics world, including the entirety of astrophysics. The vehicle of change was the arXiv preprint server, to which essentially every astrophysics, high-energy physics, condensed matter, and many other disciples' papers are posted either prior to or immediately following acceptance by print journals. As an example, here is the sum of my published scientific output, short of talks that I've given but have yet to post to my personal webpage. There is not a single paper of mine for which you would have to pay for access that could not be gotten for free. Anyone in the world can read them all, not that anyone out there should really want to. Trust me, you don't want to. I don't even want to, frankly. You'll note if you check over there, or you could just take my word for it, that many of these papers appeared in reputable journals, whose editors and referees play a major role in validating the quality of papers. I'm certainly thankful that the published ones had to get an independent reader's approval. Even when the process is a pain, it generally improves the final quality (I'd note to avoid confusion that these revisions can be updated to the "preprint" after the fact, though it is not required).

Honestly, just about any academic field would be better served by this model. The opposition forces, which seem to consist of Nature and possible Elsevier press, are blowing smoke because they have a nice racket going and don't want to even risk it. What's most frustrating about this argument, though, is that many people discuss it as if it were some big theoretical idea, whereas the actual case is that several million scientific articles currently reside on public servers (arXiv has 400,000, and is the third largest that I found with a quick search). Thus you still see arguments like this:

Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.

even though it runs completely counter to the experience of hundreds of thousands of scientists who would be forced to spend literally minutes per paper uploading it to a public archive if they weren't industrious enough to pawn off the task on a grad student. Shockingly enough, and contra Nature if you'll pardon the pun, it is actually useful for scientists to make their work as broadly accessible as possible. In my case, UIUC subscribes to every journal under the sun, but I have no access at home or on the road to anything but the free server, an extremely common problem. This is just not that difficult an issue, frankly. Science belongs to the world, not to publishing houses.